UK Immigration News

David Cameron, the UK's Prime Minister, has made a speech on immigration in which he said that he intended to 'roll out the red carpet' for 'the right migrants' but at the same time also make immigrants pay to use the National Health Service and to bar them from claiming social housing or social security benefits until they have worked in the UK for two years.

A committee of MPs has published a report which contains savage criticism of the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and its former chief executive Lin Homer. The report says that the UKBA has repeatedly misled the committee for the last six years and that senior management must have been either deliberately misleading parliament or thoroughly incompetent.

Eric Pickles, the UK's Communities Minister, has revealed that a UK government report estimates that 12,700 Romanians and Bulgarians will settle in the UK in 2014. Speaking on 18th March 2013, Mr Pickles added that he considered that the figure was 'meaningless' and said 'No matter how many fancy calculations you can make, I don't know. The truth is, nobody really knows'.

Until Mr Pickles has made his announcement, UK government ministers had admitted that the government had an estimate but had refused to say what it was.

The UK's Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg MP, has made a speech on immigration in which he proposed the introduction of a system of bond payments in order to prevent people coming to the UK from certain countries from overstaying their visas.

In a wide-ranging speech, about the immigration policy of his party, the Liberal Democrats, Mr Clegg said that he wanted to give British citizens three 'assurances'.

The UK Border Agency has announced that it will be writing to all those who applied for Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) visas before 31st January 2013 and who have yet to have their applications decided.

The UKBA released a statement on Wednesday 20th March in which it said that it was likely that it would request further information from applicants. In particular, it said it might ask applicants for

The UK's Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has announced a freeze on the registration of nurses from outside Europe after an internal audit found that its systems for verifying qualifications of foreign applicants were inadequate. The freeze has already prevented 160 nurses from taking up work in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) in the last month. Nurses including those from outside the European Economic Area cannot work in the NHS unless they have been registered with the NMC.